Tag Archive for Tech Field Day

While SPB is a very interesting protocol, my questions were about how deep into the virtual environment the protocol extends. While SPB and other networking protocols are considered by some to be network virtualization, I could not see this within the realm of the virtual network and hence, confusion reigned supreme. Depending on who is talking to each other, the same words can mean many different things. What I found amazing, still, is that most people thinks networking ends at the physical NIC within the virtualization host, and that what is inside, does not matter as much as what is outside.

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While at Interop I participated in a Tech Field Day event where Spirent was talking about their new Axon product as well as the possibility of usage of Blitz.io. It was an interesting discussion but gave me some food for thought. As we move to cloud scale apps based on platforms such as Pivotal (EMC World was just down the street), OpenShift, and others, we need a way to test those applications at scale. Spirent and Ixia provide these tools, but would they be used in this new model.

The Virtualization Field Day delegates joined the Virtualization Security Podcast as guest panelists on 2/23 and the topic of the day was cloud security. There were questions about compliance, security of the tenant, and security of the administrators, and legal issues. There were answers from Rodney Haywood (Rodos), another Virtualization Field Day Delegate and cloud architect as well as the podcast standard panelists. So what did the questions boil down to?

While participating in the GestaltIT Virtualization Field Day #2, I was asking PureStorage on whether or not SSD based storage was throwing hardware at a problem that is better fixed, by changing the code in question? What brought this thought to mind was the example used during the presentation which was about database performance. This example, tied to a current consulting problem, where fixing the database improved performance by 10x. This alleviated the need for over all storage improvements. So the question remains, is using SSD, throwing hardware to solve a basic coding problem?

As a delegate for Tech Field Day 6 in Boston, I was introduced to VMware’s Mobile Virtual Platform (MVP) which allows you to have a single hardened VM running within, currently, very few Android-based devices as such requires a version of Android from VMware for the virtual machine aspect of MVP. The first version of MVP has several interesting security features as well s security issues as you move forward. Given the current spat of Android based malware, it is important to consider the security features of any new product whether it is a version 1.0 or not. Even with these issues, MVP has some very interesting uses outside the realm of a mobile phone platform. I can see this being used on tablets as a way to get a corporate VM.

As a delegate for Tech Field Day 6 in Boston, I was introduced to several virtualization and performance management tools from vKernel, NetApp, Solarwinds, Embotics, and a company still in stealth mode. With all these tools and products I noticed that each were not integrated into the roles and permissions of the underlying hypervisor management servers such as VMware vCenter, Citrix XenConsole, or Microsoft System Center. This lack of integration implies that a user with one set of authorizations just needs to switch tools to gain a greater or even lesser set of authorizations. This is not a good security posture and in fact could devolve any security to non-existent.